Miracle Apples

Chapter 4

‘When I got to the rice fields, I found that the river had overflowed, and only the tips were poking out of the water. This was exactly why I didn’t fancy the life of a famer. Remember, I was Mr Efficiency! I immediately pulled out my abacus and calculated the cost of the damage. Even if you sweated away, covered in dirt, a whole year’s income could be lost as a result of the weather. If you did your homework, you could only conclude that farming was an inefficient, outdated occupation. There was something my mum used to say though. “Being a farmer is much better than working as a cog in a machine. You might not make money, but I like this much better.

As you get older you can be sure you’ll want to get back to the soil.”

I doubt if my mother, having grown up before the war, had a proper schooling, but she did read a lot. She would suddenly come out with words of wisdom. Looking back, she said some wonderful things, but I didn’t listen at the time.’

Kimura had a stroke of luck, however, whilst helping his father and wondering if there wasn’t a way out of farming. His brother, who had joined the Self-Defence Forces, changed his mind and returned home. This meant he was freed from his obligations as heir to the house. Should he go back to the city to work, or work as a proper apprentice in the tuning shop in Shonan and become a mechanic? His had his dreams, but in the end he decided to stay with farming.

At the age of twenty two, he married Michiko Kimura (from this point Akinori Mikami becomes formally known as Akinori Kimura). Michiko was the eldest daughter of a farming household and, when he married her, Kimura had to marry into the family. Pursuing a life in farming was perhaps his destiny.

‘I worked really hard at farming. I’d married into the family, so unless I was serious about my work I’d be kicked out. Ha-ha-ha. Then I discovered what I thought was a ray of light in farming. Guess what? A tractor! It wasn’t a small, Japanese tractor. You know those huge tractors you see driving around big fields in America or wherever? I’d seen them in magazines and other places and quite fancied trying out that sort of farming.

It was called industrial farming. They ploughed large acreages with tractors, and grew wheat and corn. If I was going to farm, then I wanted to try that dynamic kind of farming. So I decided to grow corn. I thought I’d try creating corn fields similar to the ones in America. To be honest, I was completely obsessed with that tractor. Tractors are basically simple constructions assembled around an engine linked to a transmission. There are none of the frills you get with a car. It’s like an engine on wheels. If you like vehicles they’re addictive. The more I fiddled with it, the more I liked it and, in the process, fell in love as I had with motorbikes. Ha-ha-ha … . So a big reason I stuck at farming was because I wanted to fiddle with tractors.’

There’s one other product for which the Iwaki region is well-known today. Corn. Dakekimi corn, which takes its name from the well-known Dakekimi Highlands, is surprisingly sweet and delicious. In summer, before the apples start appearing, Dakekimi is the quality product from this area. Golf ranges now stand alongside Route 30, which follows the Mount Iwaki ridge, but at that time they were unkempt fields. They were fields in name only. It was really rough, overgrown ground. Renting a large area of this wasteland, Kimura took his first steps in large-scale farming.

He started out growing corn as well apples. His partner was the imported tractor he purchased at the outset.

‘It wasn’t a dowry as such, but when I got married my own parents gave me some fields and a little money they’d got together. I used it to buy the English tractor. It was made by a company called International Harvester. Studying various magazines and books I couldn’t find a Japanese tractor more powerful than 30 horsepower, but the International Harvester was 45 horsepower. Even though it was a diesel, the engine didn’t need pre-ignition to start. Diesel engines are advanced in Europe. Having decided to go ahead, I found the address and wrote a letter to England. I supposed they wouldn’t be able to read the Japanese script, so I wrote the letter using the alphabet. Well, I didn’t know English, and though I say I wrote it in English, the words were Japanese. “Torakuta no katarogu wo okutte kudasai. Akinori Kimura” … Ha-ha-ha! Still, International Harvester did reply with a catalogue! How much was it now? I’m pretty sure it was about one and a half million yen. Pretty expensive. The Crown saloon car was about one million yen at the time. Agricultural machinery’s expensive!’